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00:00We love Mike DiCorsi on Coast to Coast, the legendary scribe of the sporting news.
00:04You catch him on Fox Sports doing college basketball, Big Ten Network.
00:07He's on the take for the Indiana Hoosiers.
00:09And he's a real diehard Steeler fan.
00:13He won't admit that publicly.
00:15But I want to start with your article on the Tennessee quarterback who quit and, you know,
00:22blew off practice, games, spring games, walked out, transferred to UCLA.
00:30I guess with his brother.
00:32And I really like the end of your piece when you were talking about that.
00:36He'd fail the business class with his decisions on, you know, at some level, like he may not
00:43understand what he's dealing with at the next level, what this is going to do to him or what
00:49it's going to mean for him in the future that he like I'm assuming, like at some level when
00:55I read it, that you thought he made a bad decision.
00:57And then some people think Heupel's like a hero for saying, get out then.
01:03Yeah, I don't buy the hero act now because at the time he had a chance to take a stand
01:09and say, you know, we're going with a Tennessee man.
01:12As Bo Schembechler once said when Bill Frieder left for Arizona State in the middle NCAA tournament,
01:19we're going to go with a Michigan man.
01:20Well, he decided to go with a UCLA man at quarterback.
01:26They're bringing in a transfer from the portal who had been at UCLA and now will have the
01:31shot to be the Vols quarterback.
01:33So no hero designation for Tennessee.
01:38I think they did the right thing, but I don't think that they stand above everybody else in
01:43college football for doing the right thing.
01:45But Nico, in his circumstance, did the absolute wrong thing on every level.
01:50At the time, it seemed like maybe he could at least get some short-term money out of it,
01:55Scott.
01:55But every report indicates that he's going to make less at UCLA than he was going to make
02:02at Tennessee.
02:03And add in the complication of what you have, the signal you have sent to the NFL.
02:10Look, if he turns out to be the next, I'm trying to think of somebody that was somebody that's
02:17an absolute no-brainer number one guy, and we haven't had one of those for a while.
02:22But if he turns out to be someone that absolutely is so gifted that you have to take him, it won't
02:29really impact him.
02:30But I don't think that I've seen anybody who analyzes these things suggest that he's that.
02:35He's a guy who's going to fight to get a job in the NFL.
02:38And what he has now done is put on his resume that he'll walk out, that for an extra dollar
02:46or two, presumably, he'll walk out.
02:49Well, that's not what they're looking for in a backup quarterback.
02:51They want you there every single day, every single minute of film.
02:56They want you always available.
02:57They want you committed.
02:59And he has suggested to the NFL, now he's not that.
03:03And Scott, there's so much money in being an NFL quarterback and not just the elite,
03:07not just the top five or six.
03:10I guess Burrow is the guy I should have mentioned in my suggestion.
03:15Like, if he turns out to be Joe Burrow, that's one thing.
03:18But he's not that guy.
03:20He's not even close to Joe Burrow.
03:22Yeah, so he has hurt himself immeasurably, both in the short term where he'll take a pay cut
03:32and more importantly in the long term where teams are going to have to – he's going to have to earn their trust.
03:39Josh Dobbs, who came from the same university, Tennessee, a brilliant young man who has been an absolute asset to every organization he's been with,
03:48but never a great quarterback, a nice backup to have who do the right things and show up on time and be smart and make good suggestions
03:56and pay attention in meetings and use his intelligence to contribute to the franchise.
04:02That's what your model is.
04:04And Josh Dobbs is going to make, I think, it's around $8 million over the next two years.
04:09He's been in the league for basically a decade.
04:11And when he's done playing football, he'll have made about $50 million, ballpark, maybe more.
04:17And how you could mess around with that, I have no idea.
04:21Then you're just stupid.
04:23You wrote about the prices of guys that are backups now that are like third stringers like Allen that played with the Steelers,
04:30and now he's making like 1.2 or something like that.
04:33But that they're taken seriously as pros in, you know, everything you mentioned, the meetings, practice, being on time, being there.
04:43This is no joke.
04:44I don't think the kid understands at this point in his life what he's dealing with in the future.
04:53Someone's not giving him good advice.
04:56Yes.
04:56There's no question the advice was awful.
04:58It was horrendous because what he absolutely should have done was complete the process at Tennessee.
05:06And then if he decided that he wanted to transfer in the window that opened after the spring game and all of that,
05:13I don't think that people would have thought it was a wise move,
05:15but I don't think it would have been viewed in quite the same way as not showing up for the final practice
05:21and not showing up for the spring game is being viewed.
05:24I think that's a much different scenario.
05:26Again, it never made sense to leave Tennessee when the starting job was his.
05:32The team around him was very capable.
05:34They won 10 games a year ago.
05:36It never made sense to leave that.
05:39But if there was a way to leave that, that he did not follow,
05:42that would at least have been less objectionable.
05:45So he's not a trendsetter.
05:46You don't believe that other, let's just say, kids are going to follow his lead and try to pull these shenanigans because it would behoove them not to do that.
05:59No, I think he's now the example that every other coach will use when faced with that, someone coming and saying they want more money,
06:07they'll say, you want to be the next Nico?
06:10I don't think you want to be the next Nico.
06:12But if you do, the door is right there.
06:14And I think the player will say, no, I don't want to be the next Nico.
06:18I don't know how many guys will be dissuaded from making that extra ask for a little bit more money.
06:25I don't know exactly how many.
06:26I think there will still be still be some dissuaded from doing that.
06:30If you're going to negotiate, you do it appropriately when you don't have already an agreement in place,
06:38which Nico's reportedly was a multi-year agreement that he agreed to back when he was coming out of high school.
06:48So you need to have in the current circumstance, you need to be up for renewal, so to speak,
06:54to pull off what Nico tried to do.
06:58So the Sporting News wrote the other day, somebody in there was writing about the Steelers should go after Cousins.
07:06I want to know if you buy into that.
07:09And I also want to know, you said to me earlier off air that you don't think really more than one guy's a first rounder
07:16as far as quarterbacks go in this draft Thursday night.
07:19No, everything I see, Scott, when I look at the tape on the other first rounders,
07:24aside from Cam Moore, the other first round projected quarterbacks,
07:27when I look at the tape and then when I look at the scouting reports from people who are paid to do these things,
07:33everything I read is, OK, what's the problem with Shadur Sanders?
07:37Not a great arm.
07:38What's the problem with Jackson Dart?
07:39Not a great arm.
07:40Hey, if you're not, if you don't have a great arm, there's no way you should ever be a first round pick.
07:45I don't care how elite you are at processing information, as Shadur apparently is, or how tough and competitive you are.
07:52The elite quarterbacks in the league look at it, except for maybe Lamar Jackson, who's got a terrific arm, but not next level.
08:00But Burrow, Allen, Mahomes, those guys all have extraordinary arm talent.
08:06And we're not seeing that from this group.
08:08It may be in next year's group.
08:10The Louisville quarterback may have that.
08:13He has some other areas he's not as strong.
08:16But if you're not, if you're not possessing an elite arm, you're not, you're Kenny Pickett.
08:21I mean, you're just taking another lap around the Kenny Pickett track.
08:24So, do you think the Steelers should pay $20 million for Cousins, or do you think they should keep trying to convince this guy, Aaron Rodgers, who doesn't seem interested at all?
08:38I got five seconds.
08:40Cousins or Rodgers?
08:41If I had a choice, I'd go Cousins.